Posts Tagged ‘post-compo’

Yippee! I’ve finished the post-compo version of Fibonacci Grid.
-Changes——
1. Added Main Menu (Now that I’m not restricted to 1 screen)
2. Added In game menu w/ restart – quit – and music option
3. Added stats tracking to main menu
4. Added level adjustment to increase over times the game is played.
5. Added 2 new game modes!
-TIMED MODE – race against the clock and not a move count
-ZEN MODE – no limits on your math skills… just click until you hit the goal… or have to reset.

Main change is to the controls. There’s now just one action button, which performs the displayed action, and a button to toggle between possible actions. The displayed action now also hints at what will happen if you perform the interaction, which is helpful when telling

‘craft this item’

from ‘kill the sheep in front of me’

Which will drastically cut down in the number of ‘oh shit I didn’t mean to do that’ interactions. It also highlights the tile on which the action is performed and as such hints at possible directional usages (the previous system of asking you which direction to use and forcing you to guess randomly is gone now).

Another much-needed feature is a simple highlight of your spawn location, which is now highlighted by a simple lighting effect.

Other changes include the addition of the Goad, which helps control sheep movement, and buffs to meat and grass seeds.

I hope that with this update the game’s difficulty will actually come from inability to juggle all necessary tasks rather than figuring out how the controls work.

A few months ago, I made my first puzzle game ever for Ludum Dare 29. It was well received (#16 in Innovation!) and players called it “clever” and “challenging”, but the difficulty curve was too steep. Now, I finally found the time to make a post-compo edition with more and easier tutorial levels to ease the beginning and a really hard one where you can test your mettle! I humbly present:

Snake meets platformer physics!

A short puzzle game combining two
well-known concepts to form a unique hybrid.

“But,” you might say, “only 9 levels?” Yeah, for now. I think it’s enough to demonstrate the concept well and especially the later levels might take some time to solve. I’m pondering releasing it on Android soon, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll search for a level designer and get more levels made. If you like it and want more of it, please leave a comment!

I was never able to get my project as far as I had hoped to, so with the positive feedback I’m eternally grateful for by those who have tried what I was able to accomplish and submit for the LD48 Jam, I have continued forward with development for a Post-Compo release.

Above you can see me experimenting with the latest addition-the elemental effects your weapon will be able to gain through the destruction of boxes dropped by mini-bosses (the larger enemies seen). It’s not actually effecting anything yet, but I’m really happy with its implementation and the visual representation.
Your weapons attack will leave a trail based on what elements it has gained and to what degree, and crystals of each element will appear on your head-the slower they spin the less time left before its effect disappears.
A fun note-something I often hear is ‘I wish the enemies would be damaged by their attacks as well’, so a fun quirk I’ve kept is that while enemies won’t cast effects on each other for balancing purposes and to keep the experience fun, I have made it so they still deal damage-at 10%, and knockback. So it keeps all the fun of knowing they are being damaged without poorly effecting the experience or balance (having the mini-boss wipe out its minions before you even attack isn’t the best haha).

Other things I’ve changed/added since the competition.

A lot of refining of the satisfaction of dealing and receiving damage along with more visual recognition (The sounds, color tint that builds up with consecutive hits-red for normal hits/yellow critical hits, and knockback).

Background music from our music artist Kevin Green (heard in the video above).

Refinement of attack mechanics (the orb on the left/right of your characters head shows your left/right mouse button attacks charge), the left attack continues to get faster as it is held-when the left orb is empty you can only swing once consecutively, the right-attack requires an initial cost and auto-casts when the orb is emptied-it also has twice the chance to deal a critical hit.

Some noteworthy quirks with the elements-you’ll gain them separately for your left/right attack depending on which attack you break open the box with, and upon each swing you’ll have a ‘chance’ to cast any element you have up to its level (nothing is guaranteed). This keeps your normal attacks valuable and each swing playing a vital part while balancing out the experience (and if you manage to get away from an enemy after one swing you might escape the full wrath of their elemental damage too). It really expands the experience in a fun way instead of the traditional mechanics for this.

I hope you enjoy what you see in the video and look forward to more progress on this, hoping to complete it for a release soon after the Ludum Dare judging is finished.

This post is more about my plans for my game Matters of Perspective post-compo, and how I want to blow the player’s mind even more

If you haven’t seen my game Matters of Perspective, a game about changing perspective from sidescroll to perspective to explore eerie rooms, please do check it out and let me know what you think!

Even if you don’t rate it, any feedback in the comments is very valuable to me!

Here’s a quick gif showing a change in perspective:

There has been a lot of positive feedback about Matters of Perspective. Players seem to love the game mechanic of warping perspective from sidescroller to first person shooter, and where it can go for good puzzle-platforming. So I’ve decided to keep developing it post-compo! You can follow developments on my Twitter account, @llnesisll.

For now, I’m working out a pipeline that’ll make level designs easier to model and iteratively improve. During Ludum Dare, I manually placed every individual block you can see, totalling perhaps 1500-2000 blocks (I didn’t keep count, and won’t bother to check the exact number :p). For more complex levels made with these blocks, making changes to geometry becomes very time-consuming and error-prone. I’m now using Google Sketchup 8 for modelling levels, and the PlayUp plugin for exporting them into Unity. Here’s a screenshot of the second level’s new design, which will hopefully fix two things: accidentally falling out of the world (yikes!), and giving better indication of when the level is in a solved state (in particular, accentuating the size of the path opened when both bridge and wall are moved out of the way), so the player knows when and how they can exit.

This seems to be the way to go. I’ll need to be careful to manually place colliders as needed, though. I don’t really trust Unity’s mesh colliders for complex geometry.

– rework sidescroller to use 2D physics (the current solution uses a 3D sphere in sidescroller mode, which can catch on geometry that you can’t see because it extends into the screen…!). This will also need a solution for adding corresponding 2D colliders for each 3D collider.

– create a list of interesting components to put in puzzles – eg, conundrums like level 2, managing blocking off & unblocking the exit until you’re in the ideal position to get to it. In general, problems that benefit from the “working backwards” method to solve them. Mix these together in ascending difficulty to make complex + interesting levels, increasing in challenge.

– add some kind of unlockable reward at the end of the game for collecting all the easter eggs, to serve as motivation to re-play. I planned to include this during the compo, but ran out of time to come up with something worthwhile, so I just left the easter eggs to be interesting to get on their own right.

– add a “kill z” tracker, to handle cases where the player falls out of the level (I’ll do my best to make sure that can’t happen, but a failsafe is always good!)

– add a menu option for adjusting mouse sensitivity (there’s such a wide variety of mouse sensitivities player use that it makes sense to offer this)

– (maybe hire someone) develop aesthetic for tiles that gives one distinct look and feel from sidescroll perspective (eg, feels like you’re in a cave), and a different look and feel from first person shooter perspective (eg, now you can see the sides of blocks that are smooth and futuristic, the cave-like textures on top of them look more like bundled wires passing through… or something like that ). The purpose of this is to really blow the player’s mind when changing perspective from sidescroller to first person.

– (maybe hire someone) get some good eerie ambient music to play in the background as you play. Ideally, it’d be great to have music that changes depending on being in sidescroll vs first person perspective. (eg, 8bit-sounding for sidescroll, then cross-fading to the same track but with more of an electro-synth vibe to it…? Iunno, music isn’t a forte of mine.)

I made a game called Meddle for Ludum Dare 29. It won first place in Innovation. Obviously, I wasn’t just going to let an award-winning idea sit there and die in a little 7-or-so-level game without making something bigger, so I decided to postpone my other projects indefinitely to make a post-compo version of Meddle. I renamed it to “Spanner in the Works” because “Meddle” has three homophones to get confused with (in my accent, anyway): “metal”, “medal”, and “mettle”.

I have many ideas for Spanner in the Works. I have the beginnings of an interesting (and secret) story, and also some new graphical utilities that will let me use SVG graphics with animation from Synfig in HaxePunk. In introspection mode there will be monochrome, pixelated graphics along with the matrix-style text from the original, although I don’t know whether to make the sprites green on black or black on green. I also don’t know whether to give the player just one command slot, like in the original, or multiple. Suggestions are welcome.

And here’s a comparison between the original Meddler sprite and the new, vectorized version:

Look at how much he’s grown!

I think that’s it. There is now nothing else to say. If I say anything more at this point, it’s probably pointless. So it’s a good thing I’m not saying anything. Yup. If I kept saying stuff, that would be such a waste of time. Good job realizing when it was time to stop and stopping, me.

As I received a lot of good feedback on my LD29 entry, “Oh My Oilrig!”, I decided to continue working on it. After rewriting the whole code base, I added more features and designed stuff for upcoming updates. Now, the first release version is up in Google Play! If you have an Android device, go grab it and tell me what you like ^_^ –> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manabreak.oilrig

Thank you so much for everyone who played my entry and gave me awesome feedback, wouldn’t have done it without you guys and gals.

Intro Tips

This being my third Ludum Dare I had a decent idea of what I was getting myself into. These game jams are really a great way of practicing on actually making something from start to finish. I think that is what many of us really need to get better at, I know I for one have put tons of time into other bigger projects which never see the light of day, maybe because they are simply too big of projects. Here are some quick tips which I’ve learned from previous mistakes and could be good for newcomers entering into a ludum dare, for starting any new game project I guess.

Start with making something really simple and make sure the “fun factor” is there early on, the rest is polish!

Don’t explore some new technology while trying to complete a game.

Give each aspect (design, planning, code, graphics, audio, testing, etc) enough time each. Don’t spend the first day and a half coding and get the rest done in a few hours.

Make sure the game is done well before the deadline so you have time for playtesting, bugfixing and polish.

The most important thing is to complete a game from start to finish, not that it’s the most feature packed perfect game.

The Game

So I’ve been playing unhealthy amounts of Spelunky lately and I wanted to make a platformer with a bit of the same vibe, and I’m a huge space fan so I went for that. When the theme got decided I thought I’d make a underground platformer. Since I love the jetpack in spelunky and don’t get it often enough, I thought I’d make a game with a similar feel as the jetpack in Spelunky. I also wanted to make a simple and addicting game with online highscore, so I played around with the idea until I ended up with what the game is now. It could still get a lot better, but I’m quite happy with the end result in just two days work.

I wanted to make a platformer with jetpacks with Spelunky feel!

Warmup & Making Music

I’m especially happy with having produced music for in the game, and am even quite happy with the end result. Truth is I’ve wanted to learn how to make music for a while now, and started various tutorials but never got very far. The day before Ludum dare I made a warmup game called Space Survivor. It took me about 2 hours to make, and looking at the highscore stats I can say that it’s probably the game I’ve made with best time coded vs time played ratio ever.. which is a bit depressing. Anyway, the cool thing is I also decided I was going to make music for the game. I opened a a music program called SunVox, which is the first music program where I actually like the UI, and decided I’m going to make a song from start to end, it doesn’t matter how crappy it is, but it’s going to be finished. My first song. Instead of trying to learn each aspect of music and mastering it before I even make a song, this technique really taught me how to make music and I put it in the game! And I’m so happy for it! The day after Ludum dare started and I made another track and put it in my Ludum Dare entry, and it turned out quite nice for my second track ever!

I used the “ludum dare” technique to learn how to make music by making a warmup game! Download here!

The Good

For the first time I felt that I was done enough for the deadline. Overall I’m very happy with the end result, here are some points which I’m happy with

I had a nice balance of time spent coding, making art, making sound, making music, testing, bugfixing and polishing which made all areas good enough!

I actually made music for my game and learned how to make it in the process!

I had online highscores – this is something that really makes some games so much more fun!

The game feels like a complete game and is polished

I invited two friends over for a little Jam-Lan-Party, this made the whole thing event more fun and I think we made better games because of it!

Even for a 48h game, the graphics went through several iterations

The Bad

Although I’m very happy with the end result, there were a few hickups.

About half way in on day two I began writing ugly code to make things rapidly. This made the final code quite cluddered and just makes it harder to update and improve the game further. I will have to spend a day just to cleanup the code later!

Lesson: Things don’t have to be perfectly coded, but alteast keep it clean and organized at all times!

Some MySQL issues have made the online highscores slow/unresponsive sometimes, which results in a lot of statistics/scores have gotten lost. This is really a shame because I wanted to present cool playstats here for you!

Lesson: Brush up MySQL skills for next time for better highscores/stats!

I’ve got about 60 ratings to my game and I’ve done 120 on others, so I can’t complain. Still somehow I feel it’s very hard to get people to try my game. I believe this is in large part because I don’t have a web version. I know the feeling when testing games, if you gotta download it, let alone run a seperate redist install, it’s hard to want to try it! I really do think this is a shame, I think games feel better when not played in a browser. And c#/xna is awesome!

Lesson: Consider using a web-platform next time or accept low play stats. (HTML5, Unity, etc)

The title. To be honest I suck at titles. It was never really my intention that the game would be named Gravity. I sort of just wrote something while designing the graphics/menu to get the style right. In the end time was running out and I hadn’t thought of a better title and then I forgot. I thought of the George Clooney film and just added a random subtitle since I thought that looked cool too.

Lesson: Titles can be important, decide on a good one early on and roll with it. It’s hard to think up a good name at the last minute!

The temporary working title ended up being final, I just removed George Clooney so that I wouldn’t need to share the royalties!

Some play stats!

With each play being registered in an online highscore, I can also calculate some play stats from them. Sadly my MySQL skills weren’t good enough in time, so a lot of the stats got lost because of a query taking very long time to load sometimes.. But here are some fun play stats at the time of writing!

Disclamer: Sadly up to approx 50% of plays may be missing, so stats below could probably be doubled, but this is what I’ve got! (Any new stats should be recorded correctly I believe)

So turns out I had a complete brain fail during the Ludum Dare weekend and totally failed to make the speed of my game’s player character independent of the FPS, which I only discovered when I accidentally destroyed Chrome a bit and suddenly it started chugging horribly, simulating playing In The Blood on a tired old computer.

I’d used the delta for computing velocity… but then multiplied it by 0.000005 for no reason I can actually remember now and the result is that the delta had virtually no effect whatsoever. So.. I fixed it. I REALLY hope this is okay, dear people in charge of such matters. It’s still the same game, no new features, but hopefully everyone playing it will have the same frustrating, tormenting and short-lived experience it was designed to provide. I wanted the game to be a difficult, challenging and hopefully addictive little action arcade game but when you’re moving ten times slower than you should? Oops.

I’ve also added a Post Compo version now! It’s the same game but I managed to add a bit of the visual Woo that I didn’t have time to do during the 48hours. It destroys the mood entirely but things are a lot clearer and hopefully a bit less motion sickness inducing. Again, sorry about that too.

Incidentally, if you like Super Hexagon style ridiculously difficult action arcade games you might enjoy other competition entries Underneath Our Faces and Diver X … and would love to hear about any other games in the compo like this!

I have recently made a small update to my game (post-compo). This update
fixes a bug on android related to putting the game in the background, and adds a much needed tutorial!
(Never underestimate how confusing your game can be, no matter how simple you make it)

“Oh My Oilrig!” is rapidly shifting gears on its post-compo journey towards becoming a full-fledged Android game. While waiting for the release, here’s a sample of the new variety of enemies: a terrifying archer who will cause aggressively mediocre damage to your precious oilrig! BWAHAHAA!!

The first release (I’m aiming for Sunday!) will have nine different enemies (three submerged, three on-the-surface and three airborne) and a variety of different defense towers (a slingshot and “ye olde cannon”, to name a few!), coupled with active and passive on-board upgrades (shields, radar, drill boost…), not to mention overhauled interface. If you’re interested, keep an eye on my Twitter feed (@dManabreak) for updates. Also, feel free to tweet and comment if you have ideas, critique or anything!